The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins [15]
The Bristol had one characteristic which made a good landing difficult for the novice. The undercarriage included rubber bungees which had a catapulting effect if you landed too fast or too hard, bouncing you back into the air like a rubber ball.
I was damned if I was going to make that kind of mistake in front of Hannah. I turned down-wind for my approach. A left-hand turn, I throttled back and adjusted the tail trimmer. I glided down steadily at just on sixty, selected my landing path and turned into the wind at five hundred feet, crossing the end of the field at a hundred and fifty.
Landing speed for a Bristol is forty-five miles an hour and can be made without power if you want to. I closed the throttle, eased back the stick to flatten my glide and floated in, the only sound the wind whispering through the struts.
I moved the stick back gradually to prevent her sinking and stalled into a perfect three-point landing, touching the ground so gently that I hardly felt a thing.
I rolled to a halt close to the hangar and sat there for a while, savouring the silence after the roar of the engine, then I pushed up my goggles and unstrapped myself. Hannah came round on the port side followed by a small, wiry man in overalls that had once been white and were now black with oil and grease. 'I told you he was good, Mannie,' Hannah said. 'You did indeed, Sam.' His companion smiled up at me. The liking between us was immediate and mutually recognised. One of those odd occasions when you feel that you've known someone a hell of a long time.
Except for a very slight accent, his English was perfect. As I discovered later, he was fifty at that time and looked ten years older which was hardly surprising for the Nazis had imprisoned him for just over a year. He certainly didn't look like a professor. As I've said, he was small and rather insignificant, untidy, iron-grey hair falling across his forehead, the face brown and wizened. But then there were the eyes, clear grey and incredibly calm, the eyes of a man who had seen the worst life had to offer and still had faith.
'Emmanuel Sterne, Mr Mallory,' he said as I dropped to the ground. 'Neil,' I told him and held out my hand. He smiled then, very briefly and thunder rumbled across the river, the first heavy spots of rain staining the brown earth at my feet.
'Here we go again,' Hannah said. 'Let's get this thing inside quick. I don't think this is going to be any five-minute shower.' He gave a yell and the other two men arrived on the run. They were simply day labourers who helped out with the heavy work when needed for a pittance. Undernourished, gaunt-looking men in straw hats and ragged shirts.
There were no doors to the hangar. It was really only a roof on posts, but there was plenty of room for the Bristol beside the Hayley. We had barely got it in when the flood descended, rattling on the corrugated-iron roof like a dozen machine-guns. Outside, an impenetrable grey curtain came down between us and the river.
Mannie Sterne was standing looking at the Bristol, hands on hips. 'Beautiful,' he said. 'Really beautiful.'
'He's fallen in love again.' Hannah took down a couple of old oilskin coats from a hook and threw me one. 'I'll take you to the house. You coming, Mannie?'
Mannie was already at the engine cowling with a spanner. He shook his head without looking round. 'Later - I'll be along later.'
It was as if we had ceased to exist. Hannah shrugged and ducked out into the rain. I got my canvas grip from the observer's cockpit and ran after him.
The house was at the far end of the field, not much more than a wooden hut with a veranda and the usual corrugated-iron roof. It was built on stilts as they all were, mainly because of the dampness from all that heavy rain, but also in an attempt to keep out soldier ants and other examples of jungle wildlife.
He went